Praise you, Father, for you are incomprehensible. You are God.
God once asked me to start a church. The church closed. As I sought God after the church had closed, He gave me a very clear sense that, yes, He really had called me to do that. In other words, He had called me to fail, or at least it looked that way. And why not? God called the King of Kings to die. If that is how God operates, He is not going to be easy to predict.
An agnostic man once told me that he would like to test scientifically whether God exists and acts in history.
“And how would you do that?” I asked.
“Oh, I would take a sample of people who believed in God and a sample of people who didn’t, and if God is real and acts in history, then the people who believe should be healthier.”
I gave him a look.
“You don’t think it would work?” he asked
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, what if God can get to a man’s soul by making his body sick? To God, that would be a good trade, and He would do it in a minute.”
The agnostic was thinking superficially, as people are custom to thinking, but God looks deeper than we do. God refused to remove Paul’s “thorn in the flesh.” God said that His grace was sufficient. The thorn forced Paul to rely on God, and that reliance was evidently worth the thorn. God says that He makes His strength perfect through weakness. He says that we gain our lives by losing them. He says that the first will be last.
God does not operate as we do. He constantly astounds us, thus, forcing us to approach Him with an open mind. He will close a church to build a man or let cancer spread to gain our trust. To us, this all sounds crazy, but it is how God works, and we must let God be God.
Unfortunately, however, many of us will not let God be God. Often we have our preconceived notions, and we will not allow God to surprise us. We, thus, miss God. At Pentecost the Holy Spirit came. The disciples had been told this would happen, and they had been waiting for it, praying for it, and expecting it. Yet when it happened, none of them had ever dreamed that it would manifest itself the way it did. God gave them the very thing they were expecting, and it still surprised them. That’s God. Too many followers of Jesus have their spiritual routines set and will not allow God to do something fresh and new. Too many churches have their programs going so efficiently that they have neither room in their minds nor time in their schedules for God to show up. If God ever did show up, one wonders whether they would recognize it. Their minds are too narrow.
A narrow mind is a heart problem, and an open mind is not the child of the mind. This is true of agnostics as well as church people. When Bart Ehrman dismisses the Resurrection of Jesus because, well, resurrections don’t happen, his argument is simply a closed mind. It may be the best argument he can give, but it is still a closed mind. His world is confined in a cramped closet, and anything outside that closet simply cannot be. Such people are not open to the possibility that perhaps God could surprise them, and their narrow mind is the product of the heart, not of the intellect.
But church people sometimes display similar narrowness. Some have no room in their theology for God to heal the sick or raise the dead today. Some are so stuck in running their church like a business that God becomes the great CEO in the sky, and He certainly would not operate outside accepted business principles, which they would call wisdom. They incorporate marketing, programming, research, technology, and fiscal policy, all of which can certainly be helpful. But none of these things is what makes the church the church. When God operates, He does so through His Spirit, and the Spirit doesn’t generally follow the market trends. Sometimes the minds of church people are so fixed on how to do church that they won’t let God work. This is a narrow mind, and it is the product of the heart.
Perhaps we want God to be safe and simple so that we can fit Him into our brains, or perhaps we fear uncertainty. Whatever it is, God still insists on being God. He is far bigger and wilder than we would like Him to be. His ways are not our ways, and we must learn to live with that. A mind open to God comes from a right heart, a heart humble enough to admit that God is bigger than we, a heart willing to let God surprise us. For if God never surprises us, we have a small God, a small heart, and a small mind.
